I write this article as a note to myself. But is also something that is almost certain to be of interest to you. Yes, you the reader. Whoever you are, I can bet my fortune that you are interested in health, fitness and vitality. You may call it by a different name but you are interested in it.
Well why wouldn’t you be? Your body is the vehicle in which you experience the magic of life, the good the bad and the truly remarkable. Wherever you go, your body will be with you. You can’t leave it behind.
So I, like all other people in this world, deeply care about my body and health and spend a lot of time exploring how to keep myself fit. Fit for an athletic challenge, fit for a physical adversity, fit for a fight, fit for being on a beach in my trunks and most definitely fit for taking those trunks off for a spicy senorita 😉
At the same time, I am a guy who best understands a concept by breaking it down into manageable pieces. I like putting things into categories. I like finding out what the levers are to move something. Let’s be clear, if you are driving a car and you try to steer it with the rear view mirrors (instead of the steering wheel) you would not reach anywhere you want to reach. So in life I am always looking to find what the steering wheel is in a particular situation.
In the endeavor to achieve and maintain a fit and healthy body I have found that there are 4 levers that make the needle move. Four spokes to the steering wheel of the car called ‘Health and Vitality’. And I want to lay out those Magic 4 for you, my audience, so that you too can organize your mind and your life around it such that you can achieve and maintain a healthy and fit body yourself. That having been said, here are the four levers:
Exercise
This is the no-brainer. Our body was meant to move. We are predominantly hunters and gatherers. And sitting on a chair, stooped low and staring into the abyss of laptop screens for 8 hours daily pretty soon turns into disaster for the once fit and energetic body.
Exercise is a must. End of story. Do it daily if you can. If not, at least 3-4 times a week for at least an hour. Exercise can mean different things to different people. But here are the most common forms.
- Strength (also called Resistance) training – Lifting heavy things at the gym, or lifting your own body weight at the functional gym
- Endurance training – This means relatively low stress physical motions repeated hundreds or thousands of times, includes running for long distances or swimming
- Balance or Calisthenics – This recruits a little bit of strength training and little bit of endurance training; this most often includes people standing on their hands, hanging sideways by poles or jumping over heightened obstacles (roughly speaking)
- Stretching & Body Posture training – This would include exercises that perhaps you’d do during warm-up or exercises your physiotherapist will ask you to do if you sprained your back (while they seem low-grade in terms of effort required but are on my top priority list)
- Yoga Aasanas and Power Yoga – A brilliantly calibrated combination of movements discovered by ancient Yogis that are proven to have a cascade of positive health benefits
- Walking – Honestly I don’t consider walking as exercise. I mean that’s lowering your standards way too much. But if you don’t move your ass at all, walking is a great place to start. Maybe start with walking and graduate to hiking.
Nutrition
Nutrition is the elusive ingredient that is simultaneously the most important to your health and the most difficult to master. Everybody knows they should eat clean, lean and healthy but the marvelous taste of choco fudges and wheaty pizzas is just too incredible to pass.
Well one of the lessons I learned was you don’t have to give up tasty food in order to eat clean. You just need to find out dishes that are both healthy and delicious. Another lesson I learned was it’s in your own benefit to fantasize and glorify the good-for-you foods and focus on their taste along with their health benefits in order to ensure you actually eat them consistently. So I’m constantly looking for restaurants that serve awesome and creative salads. But nutrition is also very confusing. Everyone has an opinion. And each one seems to differ from the other in one way or the other. Articles are many and it’s too much too keep up with. There was a quote that said:
As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.
So I want to lay out some principles that I’ve found out along the way.
- Don’t measure or track weight, track body composition and inches (Body composition means how much % of your body weight is fat and how much is lean muscle mass)
- If you want to lose weight, first way to go is maintaining Caloric Deficit for a few weeks. If you want to gain weight, first way to go is maintaining Caloric Surplus for a few weeks. It’s when you want to lose fat but gain lean muscle mass is when you must get into specifics of Macro-Nutrients
- Don’t count calories, count macro-nutrients i.e. count Proteins, Fats and Carbs (and fiber for that matter)
- Generally speaking, simple carbs and processed carbs do you no good (simple carbs basically means Sugar; processed carbs mostly mean things like donuts, pastas, cookies etc. but also include white flour and bread)
- If you are buying a food item that has come in a packet or a container, it has INSANE amounts of sugar in it (no exception; even ketchup has loads of sugar)
- Eating raw, eating fresh does you all kinds of good; So go for veggies and fruits and water as much as you can
- There is a minimum amount of proteins and good fats that you must consume on a daily basis
- Fasting is very good for the body, if you can’t fast for full days try intermittent fasting
- Micro-nutrients are often neglected but are the most important piece of the puzzle; eat lots of fruits and variety of colors in your plate and don’t shy away from taking supplements every once in a while (especially Vitamin D as it’s not readily produced in the body)
Sleep
This is one that mostly polarizes people. If I randomly pick any group of 100 people, half of them would be who have no issues whatsoever with sleep and don’t even find it as an issue to talk about. The other half would swear that their sleep habits are doomed and are disastrous, not to put too fine a point on it. This second group would also try to convince you that they can never change, because they’ve already tried everything under the sun and nothing works.
I’m not talking to the first half here. I am trying to speak some sense into the second half.
I know you have irregular sleep. I know you go to bed late and keep fiddling with your smartphone. I know you can’t wake up early even if your life depended on it. I know some of you are so overworked (albeit ambitious) that sleep seems like something that comes in the way of your days. You would rather not have it at all. Or some of you sleep so much all the time that you are fed up of it now.
See it’s simple. The science is in. For some reason, not entirely understood by researchers yet, sleep is a single stone that kills dozens of birds each night you fall into that carefree trance.
- Sleep gets your body to recover from all the wear and tear of the day
- It integrates recent memories into your psyche and consolidates long term memory
- It cleans up your skull of all the toxins that get accumulated around your brain due to the heavy mental activity throughout the day
- It aids muscle growth and regeneration
- It helps your psyche sort through problems and priorities and keeps your bodily functions in homeostasis
- It puts your body in relaxation mode and induces overall healing, almost to the cellular level
They say that if you go 2 nights without adequate sleep, there’s not even one single cell in your body that’s not adversely affected (totally paraphrasing here)
But my intention in telling you all of this is to just push you to take sleep seriously. Sleep is simple, it doesn’t take too many strategies. Just a few simple steps, as follow:
- Go to sleep and wake up at roughly the same time every day (whatever that time is)
- Try to sleep 7-8 hours every night, each one has a different optimal number of hours they need. One good way to find out is to not put any alarm and wake up when you naturally wake up. (Obviously if you have a 9-5 job you’d need to keep buffer to implement this)
- Don’t have caffeine or excessive alcohol few hours before bed time
- Try to stop work or heavy mental activity by 7-8 pm so that you can gradually ease into relaxation mode
- Don’t look at bright blue lights (including your laptop and smartphone screen) at least for the last 4 hours of your evening because that signals your brain that it is still day time and screws up your circadian rhythm
- Pro tip – get a night mask, listen to relaxing sounds or night guided meditation before sleeping, keep the room especially dark and ideally a little cold for ideal sleep
Relaxation
This is something that perhaps I’m most guilty of violating. Worry and stress is the number one killer across the world. Long term sustained stress directly leads to Chronic inflammation in the body and chronic inflammation has been called to be the leading cause of all-cause mortality by World Health Organisation. (so I’ve heard)
Stress hits you from a thousand directions. The problem is that in today’s world you cannot entirely eliminate stress, though any steps taken towards choosing an environment with comparably lower stress is always a wise move on your part.
The good news is you don’t entirely need to eliminate stress. You can counter-act on it using the arch enemy of stress i.e. Relaxation. The Stress Response or the Fight-or-Flight response that animals (and humans) experience in the face of danger, threat or possibility of conflict has some very remarkably distinguishable physical responses. Your heart rate goes up, your pupils constrict, you start perspiring, go tunnel visioned, your breathing becomes faster and shallower, blood flow increases to the extremities to prepare you for the battle or escape and consequently that blood is restricted from flowing to your brain into the pre-frontal cortex i.e. the rational and reasonable part of the brain shuts off temporarily. Adrenaline is secreted and Cortisol, the stress hormone, shoots up through the roof. All of this happens automatically in an instant whenever we foresee any threat or danger or conflict. It is a remarkable set of responses that are hard-wired in the human biology as it prepares us to adequately respond to the situation and increases our chances of survival and even success in battle.
The problem is that the body cannot bear to be in this emergency and panic state for too long. By definition this mode should only be turned on when the situation demands it and immediately be turned off when the danger is averted. Unfortunately we have created our lives and our lifestyles in a manner that we’re always stressed and we’re always in fight-or-flight mode. We are always in pressure and we’re always inflamed.
The antidote is the Relaxation Response, which is a remarkable state in itself. Heart rate mellows down and becomes more even and rhythmic. Pupils dilate, the skin relaxes, your shoulders drop, forehead becomes un-crumpled. You breathe deep and into the stomach. Blood is pumped evenly throughout your body systems and your Parasympathetic Nervous System takes the reins of your body. This is that part of your nervous system that propels all sorts of healing processes in the body. Most likely you secrete hormones that make you feel happy; Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin and Endorphins.
In short it is called a beautiful state. It not only makes you feel great but heals the body in ways you can’t imagine. If you are any at all concerned about your long term health and vitality, you should give yourself a consistent dose of the Relaxation Response.
Few common ways you can trigger this marvelous Relaxation Response are:
- Meditation
- Being in nature (beaches, mountains, woods or parks; take your pick)
- Doing something you love and getting lost in the process
- Watching a heart gripping movie, play or reading a classic book
- Visiting live music concerts
- Prayer (in the place of worship if you’re religious or anyplace that’s relaxing if you’re not religious)
- That feeling after an intense work-out session
- Sex (albeit good sex)
- Great conversations with people you love
- A moderate dose of good booze
So that’s it. Those are my thoughts. I’m wrapping this up with this quote which is the best encapsulation of what I’m trying to say.
Your health and the shape that your body is in, is the single-most direct expression of your love for yourself and your love for life.
Stay healthy. Stay in love.
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